One of the most often asked requests I get is if someone can watch me work. While I enjoy watching the process used by other artists I find my own way of doing things uninteresting. When sitting at a table during a comic con you just need to let go and not feel awkward drawing in front of people, but usually I'm in my studio with my dog as the only silent witness to my trash can full of awful sketches that will never see the light of day.

With the third chapter of Wretched Things out now I'm going to walk through my process for creating the opening double page spread, which included the credits page that is found at the front of all comics. Why the hell would you do such a thing? Well it sounded cool and cinematic when Devon pitched the idea to me and he did a helluva job describing the scene in the script. I'm always in for a challenge no matter how much extra work I create for myself.

Here's the script for the opening spread

From here it's scribbling on the script page and on random pieces of paper to come up with layouts and visual ideas.

Here's one idea, however I didn't feel like it would work by leaving enough empty space on the left for all the credits and publisher info

Small thumbnail of what was explored for the final layout

Here's the final layout. This was sent around to the various people at our publisher to get approval as we were deviating from the established design of the series as to the credits and opening pages. Once we got all the approvals this was refined even more.

Here's the final spread as digital pencils. Details have been added in for all the hero characters. Some changes were made with the spiders and centipedes. Some background centipedes were also added in to populate the scene. From here it is converted to bluelines and printed to be traditionally inked.

I'll stop here for now and continue on to the inking process in part 2.